How do you know when work is actually “done”?

This is a really important question.

We sometimes have different definitions or ideas of done.

Here’s how we do it at Impact Hackers. 

Impact Hypothesis

For tasks and projects, we use a sentence structure called an Impact Hypothesis to define our work.
With it, we are able to clarify what we are going to do ( the task or project), why we are going to do it (the goal), and how we’ll know we are successful (success requirements).

Here’s the formula:

Impact Hypothesis

<we believe>

Doing X

<will result in>

the goal

<we will know we are successful when>

success requirements

• success point 1

• success point 2

• success point 3

Here’s a simple example:

<we believe>

Publishing our monthly newsletter

<will result in>

keeping our community members engaged

<we will know we are successful when>

success requirements

• we are excited to share the newsletter draft we put together

• we include a link to sign up for our upcoming workshop

• the newsletter is published in mail chimp ( our email software) by October 9th.

Work Breakdowns (WBS)

When it comes to the steps we need to take, we create a work breakdown structure, WBS for short. It’s a simple list of all the steps to take in order to complete the work.

Example:

Publish Monthly Newsletter

• Write

  • write the newsletter draft and include our upcoming workshop – (PJ)

  • create an email campaign in mail chimp – (PJ)

  • copy-paste the draft into mail chimp and make sure the formatting is correct – (PJ)

• Edit

  • edit the newsletter for grammatical errors – (Devin)

  • edit the newsletter for tone and branding – (Devin, PJ)

  • approve the newsletter for publishing – (Devin)

• Publish

  • schedule the newsletter to automatically publish at 9 am on October 7th – (Devin)

Creating work breakdowns are helpful to ensure all the steps that ensure the integrity of the work we put out occurs, that a process is followed, and that we meet the success criteria we defined in the impact hypothesis above.

Each Step can also be assigned to team members, demonstrated by the parenthesis at the end of each bullet point above.

Work management software makes it really easy to do this. Here is a work breakdown we did for our in-person session earlier this quarter.

Work Stages

Another helpful way to manage and track whether something is done or not is to visualize its journey from the start of the work to the work being completed stage by stage.

This is something we really can’t do easily at all in email, but we can do when we move to project management software.

Here are the work stages we use for our projects.

Note – you don’t need a lot of stages. It can be as simple as To Do, Doing, Done. or To Do, Next Up, Doing, Review, Done. You get the idea.

We’ve found that projects require a bit more oversight which is why we have a number of work stages all our projects move through.

Here’s how projects can be visualized within the workflow, which helps give you a much better understanding of how close they are to actually being fully done. The visualization makes a big difference. (note the Analysis, Execution, and Definition bubbles on the left-hand side of the image)

Tasks and simple actions can be tracked with simpler stages such as – Todo, Doing, and Done.

You can also use different work stages for different types of work ex. a website update versus a newsletter versus publishing event marketing. Or at a higher level, marketing work versus donor cultivation, event management, etc.

Work States

Another helpful way track whether something is done or not is to note the work state the task or project is in

Screenshot of states we use in our system:

Here’s how states can be used from our earlier example of publishing a newsletter:

Publish Monthly Newsletter

• Write

  1. write the newsletter draft and include our upcoming workshop – (PJ) [state – complete]

  2. create an email campaign in mail chimp – (PJ) [state – complete]

  3. copy-paste the draft into mail chimp and make sure the formatting is correct – (PJ) [state – complete]

• Edit

  • edit the newsletter for grammatical errors – (Devin) [state – active]

  • edit the newsletter for tone and branding – (Devin, PJ) [state – ready]

  • approve the newsletter for publishing – (Devin) [state – ready]

• Publish

  • schedule the newsletter to automatically publish at 9 am on October 7th – (Devin) [state – blocked]
    

By noting the states, we can quickly get a better sense of how things are progressing and what’s left to do.

Let us know what other questions come up for you or your team when considering how to know whether work is done and what done means in the comments!